Full concentration on constitution and reflexes – with our Skill-Guide for Cyberpunk 2077 your opponent will effectively finish off in close combat with the Katana.
In Cyberpunk 2077, sneaking and hacking is for cowards who are afraid of a few explosions and bullets. You are in the middle of the battle – no, you are the battle! Fat armour, regeneration and abnormally high melee damage make most of the fights an absolute piece of cake.
Even the fattest opponents are slaughtered with ease. If in doubt, you can send enemies to the boards in seconds with a target-seeking shotgun and keep groups of enemies in check with plenty of explosives.
You have no time for tact and unseen penetration. You go in and are not finished until you have destroyed everything around you. For this style of play, you will increase both your constitution and your reflexes. You will use mostly blade weapons such as katanas and machetes until you reach Street Cred 20 and switch to mantis blades.
Our guide to Cyberpunk 2077 will give you tips on what you need for this character build, which we have affectionately named “the biceps”.
The biceps: strengths and weaknesses
- Strengths: Comparatively simple playing style with very good damage effect. You open many closed doors with raw physical strength.
- Weaknesses: Some clever hacks you can forget. If you can’t break open a door or disable a security system, the only way out is through a window or roof.
Table of contents
- Attributes and advantage points
- The right weapons
- The right Cyberware
- Procedure in combat
- Variation of playing style: The Gorilla
Attributes and advantage points
In level ups you alternate points on constitution and reflexes. Constitution is important to open doors that remain closed to you thanks to your modest hacking skills.
Athletics: Keep moving
You will also find some excellent advantages in the rider athletics. The perks are marked with numbers in the pictures and text to help you find them faster.
- Start with Regeneration (1) to passively restore your health during combat.
- Since you’re a melee fighter, it’s also worthwhile to run off your neck (2) for faster regeneration while you’re running around.
- Steel and Chrome (3) gives you more melee damage, while Epimorphosis (4) improves your regeneration outside of combat and restores all of your health over time.
- I am a leaf in the wind (5) lets you dodge without using up stamina.
- In this context, running a marathon (6) is also worthwhile, so that sprinting does not cost you any more endurance.
- Warhound (7) improves regeneration in battle even more.
- Especially on harder difficulty levels, Invincible (8) is also worthwhile for more maximum health.
- You can now work towards Wolverine (9) for faster regeneration in combat.
- If you score a whopping 20 skill points in Athletics over the course of the game, Tough Motherfucker (10) will increase your armor and resistances at the start of the fight. Survival is everything!
Blades: Distant goal Mantis Blades
Since your ultimate goal is to wield mantis blades, you will distribute your advantage points in the Blades section of the Reflexes section. We have marked the perks with numbers in the picture and in the text to help you find them faster.
- Blade Whirl (1) increases the attack speed with blade weapons, Tireless (2) lowers the endurance cost of the attack, Hurricane (3) increases the damage of heavy attacks.
- Offensive Defensive (4) makes defensive attacks much more powerful, and Brute Legwork (5) gives you an extra damage bonus after using Evasive Maneuvers.
- And because you’re not powerful enough, Fiery Counter (6) increases your blade damage the more your target is wounded.
- Bloody Dance (7) deals bleeding damage that can be increased via Slaughter (8) and Bloody Surge (9), while Magic Blades (10) increases your critical strike chance and Judgment and Execution (11) increases your damage against enemies with full health.
- Quicksand (12) gives you stamina by dodging, Bloodthirst (13) and Death Arrow (14) heal you when you bleed enemies, beat bleeding enemies, or kill them completely.
- If you’re good at parrying, you’ll receive plenty of healing for counter attacks via Unnyielding (15). In principle, you can take everything in the Blade Talent Tree with you.
- If you bring blades to level 20, Dragon Strike (16) grants you a critical blade damage bonus.
Destruction: with shotgun ammunition if necessary
If you’re satisfied with your toughness and melee damage, you should also take a look at Destruction in the Constitution attribute. Although you prefer melee, too many enemies close to each other like to sift you, so it might be worthwhile to take out some of them from a distance with a target-seeking smart shotgun.
We have marked the rewarding perks with numbers in the picture and in the following list to help you find them faster.
- Top Arrived (1) (more physical damage)
- Heavy lead (2) (enemies are pushed back harder)
- Bullet storm (3) (more damage), massacre (more critical damage)
- In the middle of the face (4) (faster reloading)
- Bulldozer (5) (more critical hits).
There are additional advantages under Destruction that make your shotguns even more effective, but these require a fairly high character level because you primarily increase your melee to the maximum. If you have the appropriate points at hand, you can of course unlock everything under Destruction bit by bit. But primarily we use shotguns to control annoying enemies and to pick out and eliminate outsiders from large groups of enemies.
The right weapons
With this style of play we primarily use blade weapons, i.e. everything from a simple knife to a fully-grown katana. Blade weapons are great because they can make opponents bleed if they specialize properly. This causes damage over time, can heal us, and makes it easier to fight bosses that like to run away or become temporarily invisible because we can track them by their popping damage numbers (if the option in the interface menu is enabled).
Secondary we use shotguns with the Smart feature. Basically, shotguns are only really effective at close range, because their wide dispersion means they miss enemies at medium range with the most projectiles. A Smart shotgun makes sure that the pellets all follow your target and hit it hard, which makes shotguns extremely effective and deadly.
To make this work, we need appropriate cyberware. Our suggestions for suitable cyberware are therefore as follows.
The right Cyberware
- Frontalcortex: We don’t have an awful lot of possibilities here because of our low intelligence. Heal-on-kill we can also use the mental capacity of an average doorstop and thus restore some health by killing. Really cool cyberware like Visual Cortex Support and Improved Limbic System (more crit damage and more crit chance) support your gameplay if you want to increase your intelligence to eight or nine points, but have absolutely no priority until your constitution and reflexes are powered up.
- Eyepiece system: Again, our selection is so limited due to our attributes that you better get used to the Kiroshi optics from the prologue. At least you can modify the gazers with a danger detector that marks enemies that have tracked you down.
- Circulatory system: Blood pump and biomonitor provide active and passive healing if you have the cash to do so. For a smaller budget, the micro-generator does the same, shocking surrounding enemies if your health drops too much. In case of doubt, you can also use a synlung for better endurance regeneration. You can also smoke with it.
- Immune System: Shock-N-Awe ensures that you sometimes fry surrounding enemies with an electric shock when you suffer damage. Cataresist increases all your resistances in the meantime.
- Nervous System: Kerenzikov is great because it slows down your blocking, targeting, and attacking during an evasive maneuver. It also allows you to aim and shoot while you are evading. A reflex modulator decelerates time when your health drops to a critical level.
- Integument system: Subdermal armor makes you tougher, which is always handy for melee. Supradermal tissue makes sure that you no longer bleed. Also available in flavors with other immunities. Basically you can use anything you can get your hands on in this section.
- Operating system: Since we are muddy in the head, we do not have much to choose from here. Starting at 18 constitutions, you can install Militech Berserk MK.5 and activate the Berserk ability, which increases your melee damage and armor and resistances, reduces your weapon recoil, gives you more maximum health and heals you through kills.
- Skeleton: Compact bone marrow increases your melee damage (but also the endurance cost), Synaptic Signal Optimizer grants extra health, Micro rotors increase your attack speed. For the smaller purse you can also use a micro-vibration generator (more melee damage), alternatively the Bionic Lung increases your maximum endurance
- Hands: Smart link, otherwise the smart shotgun won’t do you any good. A high quality Smart Link improves accuracy and critical hit chance. If you are chronically broke, the cheap Gammel-Smartlink without additional bonuses is enough for a start.
- Arms: Mantis blades, logical. You don’t spend the whole game increasing blade damage to the maximum in order to install any hacking gadgets in this slot. The better the quality level, the higher the damage, but also the price. Check out several Ripperdocs and decide for yourself what suits you best.
- Legs: We are totally into reinforced tendons because you can do double jumps with them. That helps a lot when you are not very good at hacking and you have to get to difficult to access areas via climbing sections. For 45,000 Eddies, however, the parts are unfortunately anything but a gift.
Procedure in the fight
- Refuel at normal: At normal or easier levels of difficulty, you are so tough with this game that you can chop your way through most situations quite safely. Enemies fall in the blink of an eye, and you stay alive by bleeding stacks and regenerating in combat.
- Dodge to hard: On harder difficulty levels, you must use evasive maneuvers generously to increase your damage (Brute Legwork). Mantis claws grant you a sprint attack that allows you to take out most enemies with a single hit and from a relatively long distance. Heavy attacks also often result in Instakill animation, but you should avoid it if you are surrounded by enemies.
Take cover: On heavy and very heavy, many enemies will finish you off with only two or three hits. Here it’s safer to seek cover and flatten tightly packed enemies from a distance with the Smart Shotgun. You should also make sure you have the highest possible armor value when you’re wearing clothes – even if this can lead to strange looks, as the following picture shows.
- Against groups: If there are too many enemies in a small area, rain grenades. You’ll find tons of them at every corner, so use them generously!
- Against individual enemies: You can use sprint attacks to slaughter individual enemies in close combat. This is quick, but if possible, always approach from behind or from the side and don’t run straight into the enemy’s sights.
- Against bosses: In Hard Mode, you prefer to attack story bosses via Hit & Run. That means: Attack briefly, start with a heavy attack, use light attacks to deal out a few piles of bleeding, run away, heal if necessary. Such a big shot sometimes knocks you down with a single hit. Patience and agility are everything. Hide, use cover, and if possible attack from ambush only. Never get too greedy. Don’t peck at the boss for too long and get out before he defends himself.
Variation of playing style: The Gorilla
If blade weapons don’t appeal to you, you can also specialize entirely in Constitution, where you can use blunt weapons to power up your stats via the Street Fighting talent tree. Instead of knives, katanas and mantis blades, you will logically opt for baseball batting and gorilla arms.
If you still want to drive double track, you can put a few attribute points into Technical Ability. This passively increases your armor. It also allows you to easily expand your talent tree item production and build your own equipment instead of having to stuff your hard-earned money down the throat of merchants or rely on loot.
As a gorilla, you may not have the same coolness factor as someone who shuts down enemies with mantis blades, but the Incredible Hulk is not one to criticize for lack of coolness. At least not for long.
